Journalist….Photographer…..Author

I’ll keep this simple. I’m not a scientist and I have no clever evidence to put forward either way concerning the world’s climate. I can only read what the so-called experts say and try to reach my own conclusions.
As I write this in Sydney, the temperature is nearing 41c, one of the hottest November days on record as Australia swelters towards the heart of summer and bushfires burn all around. Has this soaring temperature been caused by man? I have no idea – I just know that today is hot and that it will stay hot for the next few months and then we’ll be back into winter and we’ll all be complaining about the cold….while in the northern hemisphere the opposite will be happening.

There’s no doubt that the earth is drier than it was millions of years ago. The Sahara Desert was once an inland sea and geologists say that Great Britain was once lying under 1,700ft of water. The centre of Australia, now bone-dry desert, was also covered in water millions of years ago – fossils tell us that.
Some 100,000 years ago homo sapiens, our early ancestors, were using fire and probably creating quite a bit of smoke, but the inland regions of our world that were once water covered had dried up long before the cave man began rubbing two sticks together.
So the planet is drying up, but based on the way things have been going it looks like it’s going to be a very long time before our descendants – if we haven’t blown ourselves up by then – will be walking through dust looking for a tree to sit under. Or swimming around because all the ice in the poles has melted.
The problem for science, in my layman’s opinion, is that it is trying to have it both ways. Man is heating up the planet, causing the polar ice to melt and that phenomenon is threatening low-lying nations with rising sea levels – but then, the hotter the planet gets the greater the evaporation of sea water. So wouldn’t that reduce the threat, or at least ‘equal out’ the dangers of rising sea levels? Perhaps someone could explain this to me.
What I am worried about now is the alleged attempt by climate research scientists in the UK to dupe the world into believing that their data shows the world is heading towards disaster as temperatures rise.
The Guardian newspaper of Britain has acquired hundreds of private emails and documents exchanged between leading climate scientists over a period of 13 years – and if the details in them are genuine, we should all be concerned about being duped. Climate change sceptics claim the emails provide ‘smoking gun’ evidence that some climatologists colluded in manipulating data to back up evidence that climate change is being largely caused by the actions of humans.
The allegations, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent, have not been confirmed by the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. However, an alleged email exchange dated November 1999 could be cause for concern, with one scientists being quoted as writing: ‘I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature (a reference to the science journal) trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.’ This appears to be a reference to temperatures not soaring at all, but in any case this certainly suggests evidence of scientific manipulation. When scientists use words like ‘trick’ and ‘hide’ we should all be concerned – not about hot days like today but what science is saying is the reason.